Actually, Elizabeth Finch is unknowable. She’s the fictional creation of Julian Barnes, an author described by his admirers as adventurous, elegant, erudite, incisive, and formidable. All these characterizations of a good writer appear on the dust jacket of his novel, Elizabeth Finch.
All we know and will ever know of Ms. Finch has to be drawn from the novel, which is related in the experience of its narrator, a student and later occasional conversant with Ms. Finch. Our narrator attended a university-level course Ms. Finch gave called “Culture and Civilization.” It convinced him that she was as formidable a person as Barnes’s admirers regard him. You can forgive yourself for believing that Barnes could be writing about his own avatar.
The book introduces Ms. Finch’s lecture delivery style with a quotation:
Be approximately satisfied with approximate happiness. The only thing in life which is clear and beyond doubt is unhappiness.
She then asks the students to discuss this statement. Interjecting myself as a fictional member of the student body, I wonder if I would have known enough of happiness and unhappiness as a college student to raise my hand and comment. I doubt if I could have back then, though now, some decades later, I’d have something relevant to say, but probably would not. I’d be inclined to write about it instead.
In any event, it’s a proposition you can’t simply respond to with an “I agree” or “I disagree.” Back then, it would have seemed presumptuous, and now it seems too mathematical, like having to haul out a spreadsheet, “happy” in one column and “unhappy” in another, and start listing and toting things up.
But the question turns more importantly on what “satisfied” means. Ms. Finch seemed, as the narrator supposed, to be quite satisfied with her husbandless, childless life to return year after year to the university and deliver a popular class to her students. She had to believe in herself and in her commitment to scholarship, and in her students as well, to not be other than satisfied with her life. She likely knew at the end of every class that she’d done well by her students. But more as a matter of fact than something to take pride in.
In any event, the narrator took up the task of reaching his own conclusions. In the years that followed the class, he pursued opportunities to meet with Ms. Finch once or so a year, until she passed away. He then insinuated himself into the role of her literary executor and pored through her unpublished writings for support. He reached the conclusion that, as brilliant as Ms. Finch was:
She was not in any way a public person; nor would she have wanted to be. She had neither the temperament nor the aptitude for fame and so avoided it.
So now some introspection. I had earlier in my career tried to imagine myself as some sort of brilliant lecturer, albeit not on as life-affirming a theme as “culture and civilization.” For that, you’d need to be a full-blown humanist, and I was a by-the-books lecturer in elementary linguistics — phonology, syntax, semantics, language history — able to rattle off superficialities on this or that language without the understanding I would later gain of how it all comes together to be actually worth knowing. In linguistics, just as in other disciplines, humanism can hide itself under the details.
Supposing I had been one of Ms. Finch’s students, she would have recognized how raw that earlier me was. But she would not have been unkind about my pretensions to be an acknowledged authority in my field. She says:
Paradoxically, the young are more certain of themselves, while their ambition, if objectively nebulous to the outsider, seems clear and achievable to them.
The underlying unsaid advice was to be patient and earn your dreams. Looking back, my ambition did seem achievable, but it didn’t factor in the obstacles to achievement, which were mainly economic. I eventually gave up my pretensions to be recognized as good in my field. In fact, I even gave up the field itself for a couple of decades. But unsatisfied? Definitely no. Satisfied? Yeah, mostly.
But Elizabeth Finch, the book, is ultimately not so much about ambition as it is about memory and the accuracy or reliability of it, especially as we now recognize memory’s fallibility. The narrator remembers a lecture when Ms. Finch fessed up to the reliability of her own teachings, especially those dealing with historical figures — the names that made it down through the centuries. She questioned:
Why should we expect our collective memory — which we call history — to be any less fallible than our personal memory?
The answer to her was that the stories of history that do survive embody some essential truth. It’s that truth that keeps us holding on to them. It’s the truth embedded in parables — Aesop, the Bible, the Greek gods, the Buddha’s life story. There are lessons in those stories that explain their persistence, even when the story lines themselves have no truth to them.
The narrator, by this point in his research, thinks about what Barnes names posthumous memory, that is, the stories we tell of those who’ve passed. These stories are increasingly subject to the fallibility principle and finally often succumb to extinction. Even written stories suffer this end, though possibly with the Internet, that might change, since the stories will persist in the cloud. The cloud, though, is a storage locker, and it could ultimately be just the AI bots who do the “remembering.” But bots (at least for now) don’t have the imagination or the human context to endear themselves to anything. In the bot version of remembering, the stories don’t breathe, even if they do survive.
So, for the moment, dismissing AI, there comes a time “when the last living person to remember you has their very last thought about you.” Your story, like the stories of billions of people, way back to our Neanderthal cousins, ceases to be. Fame can come to the rescue of your story, but acquiring fame is its own pursuit, and it’s a more demanding one than becoming satisfied with what you’ve become good at.
Some people will feel saddened about this. It’s probably one of the reasons why the living believe in heaven. Heaven is where its residents still believe they are being remembered by someone, somewhere down there; someone who will invoke them as an intercessor when they need help. Maybe that’s what cemeteries and the idea of heaven are ultimately for — maintaining the prospect of continuing to be significant.
The narrator of the novel, having put all of his acquired research into the book itself, now wonders at its conclusion if the fate of his own work will survive in the minds of some people not yet born. And that might happen, since it’s a good story, a good book. But against that possibility, those unborn folks will be young and sure of themselves, as Ms. Finch remarked, and inclined to think they can understand themselves better than she or Mr. Barnes ever could have. And so, Ms. Finch will eventually make her exit from our collective memory. I’ll think about her, though, from time to time. Maybe.
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What If I Had Known Elizabeth Finch and She Had Known Me?
Actually, Elizabeth Finch is unknowable. She’s the fictional creation of Julian Barnes, an author described by his admirers as adventurous, elegant, erudite, incisive, and formidable. All these characterizations of a good writer appear on the dust jacket of his novel, Elizabeth Finch.
All we know and will ever know of Ms. Finch has to be drawn from the novel, which is related in the experience of its narrator, a student and later occasional conversant with Ms. Finch. Our narrator attended a university-level course Ms. Finch gave called “Culture and Civilization.” It convinced him that she was as formidable a person as Barnes’s admirers regard him. You can forgive yourself for believing that Barnes could be writing about his own avatar.
The book introduces Ms. Finch’s lecture delivery style with a quotation:
She then asks the students to discuss this statement. Interjecting myself as a fictional member of the student body, I wonder if I would have known enough of happiness and unhappiness as a college student to raise my hand and comment. I doubt if I could have back then, though now, some decades later, I’d have something relevant to say, but probably would not. I’d be inclined to write about it instead.
In any event, it’s a proposition you can’t simply respond to with an “I agree” or “I disagree.” Back then, it would have seemed presumptuous, and now it seems too mathematical, like having to haul out a spreadsheet, “happy” in one column and “unhappy” in another, and start listing and toting things up.
But the question turns more importantly on what “satisfied” means. Ms. Finch seemed, as the narrator supposed, to be quite satisfied with her husbandless, childless life to return year after year to the university and deliver a popular class to her students. She had to believe in herself and in her commitment to scholarship, and in her students as well, to not be other than satisfied with her life. She likely knew at the end of every class that she’d done well by her students. But more as a matter of fact than something to take pride in.
In any event, the narrator took up the task of reaching his own conclusions. In the years that followed the class, he pursued opportunities to meet with Ms. Finch once or so a year, until she passed away. He then insinuated himself into the role of her literary executor and pored through her unpublished writings for support. He reached the conclusion that, as brilliant as Ms. Finch was:
So now some introspection. I had earlier in my career tried to imagine myself as some sort of brilliant lecturer, albeit not on as life-affirming a theme as “culture and civilization.” For that, you’d need to be a full-blown humanist, and I was a by-the-books lecturer in elementary linguistics — phonology, syntax, semantics, language history — able to rattle off superficialities on this or that language without the understanding I would later gain of how it all comes together to be actually worth knowing. In linguistics, just as in other disciplines, humanism can hide itself under the details.
Supposing I had been one of Ms. Finch’s students, she would have recognized how raw that earlier me was. But she would not have been unkind about my pretensions to be an acknowledged authority in my field. She says:
The underlying unsaid advice was to be patient and earn your dreams. Looking back, my ambition did seem achievable, but it didn’t factor in the obstacles to achievement, which were mainly economic. I eventually gave up my pretensions to be recognized as good in my field. In fact, I even gave up the field itself for a couple of decades. But unsatisfied? Definitely no. Satisfied? Yeah, mostly.
But Elizabeth Finch, the book, is ultimately not so much about ambition as it is about memory and the accuracy or reliability of it, especially as we now recognize memory’s fallibility. The narrator remembers a lecture when Ms. Finch fessed up to the reliability of her own teachings, especially those dealing with historical figures — the names that made it down through the centuries. She questioned:
The answer to her was that the stories of history that do survive embody some essential truth. It’s that truth that keeps us holding on to them. It’s the truth embedded in parables — Aesop, the Bible, the Greek gods, the Buddha’s life story. There are lessons in those stories that explain their persistence, even when the story lines themselves have no truth to them.
The narrator, by this point in his research, thinks about what Barnes names posthumous memory, that is, the stories we tell of those who’ve passed. These stories are increasingly subject to the fallibility principle and finally often succumb to extinction. Even written stories suffer this end, though possibly with the Internet, that might change, since the stories will persist in the cloud. The cloud, though, is a storage locker, and it could ultimately be just the AI bots who do the “remembering.” But bots (at least for now) don’t have the imagination or the human context to endear themselves to anything. In the bot version of remembering, the stories don’t breathe, even if they do survive.
So, for the moment, dismissing AI, there comes a time “when the last living person to remember you has their very last thought about you.” Your story, like the stories of billions of people, way back to our Neanderthal cousins, ceases to be. Fame can come to the rescue of your story, but acquiring fame is its own pursuit, and it’s a more demanding one than becoming satisfied with what you’ve become good at.
Some people will feel saddened about this. It’s probably one of the reasons why the living believe in heaven. Heaven is where its residents still believe they are being remembered by someone, somewhere down there; someone who will invoke them as an intercessor when they need help. Maybe that’s what cemeteries and the idea of heaven are ultimately for — maintaining the prospect of continuing to be significant.
The narrator of the novel, having put all of his acquired research into the book itself, now wonders at its conclusion if the fate of his own work will survive in the minds of some people not yet born. And that might happen, since it’s a good story, a good book. But against that possibility, those unborn folks will be young and sure of themselves, as Ms. Finch remarked, and inclined to think they can understand themselves better than she or Mr. Barnes ever could have. And so, Ms. Finch will eventually make her exit from our collective memory. I’ll think about her, though, from time to time. Maybe.
Similar Posts: